by Jack Fuller
When he left the Dome, he looked up Michigan Avenue to the Wrigley Building, its terra-cotta lace visible even from a half-mile away. Ahead was the old library, which had been stripped of its books and turned into a visitor center. On the Randolph Street side, he mounted a short flight of steps that led to the doorway he had entered so many times when he was growing up. There hadn’t been a coffee bar inside then. There had been no tables where people could eat a muffin or just stay warm. In those days the homeless were called bums.
Rosten took the steps of the grand staircase slowly, not bounding up them the way he had in junior high when he had taken the train downtown on Saturdays on the excuse of study. He remembered the exotic, pigeony smell of the streets, the crowds full of people you would never see at home. And the books, some of them on open shelves in the great rotunda inlaid with quotations. Goethe. Voltaire. Strange names. Strange languages. The whole world was here, all the way down to the men in tattered coats insulated with newspapers who sat at the wooden tables with open books before them and yellow eyes that did not read, the woman with the bluebird on her hat of straw, the man whose face was so dirty Rosten was not sure whether he was white or black.
At the top of the stairs he paused and looked up at the names in gold: Emerson, Longfellow. The Tiffany rotunda was set with tables and flowers. At the front stood a lattice arch for a wedding. Spenser. Bacon. Maybe the bride’s and groom’s parents had come here when they were kids to call for microfilm rolls of old Tribunes with accounts of Pearl Harbor and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Shakespeare. Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds.
“We’re talking about getting into position to ride the wave,” Joyce had told the board on the conference call. “If we do, we could be the next Cisco Systems, the next Oracle. If we don’t, we’ll become a mom-and-pop credit bureau without enough resources to keep the brass polished in the lobby.”
Rosten looked again at Shakespeare’s golden name. Then he turned away. He could not hope to hold the opposites of the universe inside him, all the p’s and not p’s. If it can’t have the clarity of numbers, then at least let it be about knowing your place. “Are you in?” All the way.
As he returned to the Dome, he checked his BlackBerry. Having nothing to say about the Journal report was not viable. D&D’s price continued to drop. It was as if Rosten’s doubts had suddenly appeared on the screen of every Bloomberg terminal. But if he had learned anything, it was that at the bottom line, you had to believe in the leader more than you believed in yourself.
“Joyce is looking for you,” Gail said. “Really looking.”
Rosten found him in a state.
“Out for a constitutional?” Joyce said.
“Trying to clear my head,” said Rosten.
“It better have worked.”
He turned and laid his hand on the Bloomberg on the credenza. Its graphs had become a horror movie. The Something of the Apocalypse.
“We need to work the phones,” Joyce said.
“Selective disclosure?” Rosten said.
Joyce punched a button on his console. The phone at Marcia’s desk rang.
“Get Sebold,” he said. “Harms, too . . . No. If I wanted anybody else, I would have told you.”
He dialed Twine, but the guru was not immediately available. Instead, Twine’s right-hand man came on the speakerphone. He advised that they could safely say there had been very preliminary discussions but that the report of a proxy fight was false. This needed to go out on the wire before any telephone calls were made to investors. An open conference call would be a very good idea.
Harms came in on the tail end of this.
“They’ll ask if you would consider going hostile if discussions break down,” she said as Sebold appeared.
“It would be best if we could simply rule out the possibility,” Sebold said.
“No present plans,” said Joyce.
“That’s limp,” said Sebold.
“Niko knew we’d be pushed in this direction,” said Joyce. “He counted on it when he leaked.”
“We don’t know that,” said Sebold.
“What exactly do we know, counselor,” said Joyce, “other than fifty ways to cover our ass?”
It wasn’t hard to shut a man down. There were a lot more than fifty ways to do it.
To Rosten’s surprise, Harms spoke up.
“The market wants visibility going forward,” she said. “You need to come out strong.”
“I will say that the only people talking about a proxy fight are at the Wall Street Journal,” said Joyce.
“Works for me,” said Sebold.
“Nyström might leak the letter you just sent,” said Rosten.
“It doesn’t say a word about going hostile,” said Joyce. He pulled out the text and read it aloud.
“People can read between the lines,” said Rosten.
“OK. Sure,” said Joyce. “But this is all beside the point. Niko won’t dare leak a document. Somebody could tie it right to him, and he’d be looking at prison time. How do you think pretty boy would do on that market?”
“I think we should get a straw-man press release working,” said Harms.
“Write fast,” said Joyce. “We reconvene in thirty minutes.”
In his prime Rosten could have knocked something out in a third of that. But that was when he was spending his days imagining the stories of unnatural men.
When they gathered in Joyce’s office again, they tortured Harms’s wording the way the analysts had been torturing the numbers in the acquisition models. Twine had become available again and blessed the final version. He only said about thirty words, most of one or two syllables.
The Q and A on the open conference call was rambunctious. After it ended, the Secret Committee scattered to throw together a few things and race to Midway for wheels-up at 8 p.m., destination Teterboro. They had back-to-back sessions scheduled with leading buy-side firms starting at 8 a.m. Eastern. That meant snaking their way back and forth across town all day to be snarled at. The more of D&D a firm owned, the angrier it would be.
When they arrived at the Plaza, the lobby was still alive. Rosten was not. He went straight to his room but did not even have a chance to pee before the phone rang. It was Harms, saying they had better talk. He met her in the bar.
“It was just you and me today,” she said. “Sebold folded.”
“It was you,” Rosten said. “You were the rock.”
“But you are obviously the only one who has the clout to keep Brian out of trouble tomorrow,” she said.
“He knows the script.”
“I don’t know where we would be without you.”
“You would be in the Oak Bar with someone else.”
“Who would you be with?” she said.
“Nobody,” he said. “Nobody at all.”
“That’s just a waste.”
She clearly enjoyed whatever his face was showing.
“We’d better focus on the stock price,” he said.
“Or we could think of harm well done.”
“There’s something to fall asleep thinking about,” he said.
Grace heard the slam of the bathroom door, the sibilance of the shower. Luisa was finally astir. It was a late start for both of them. Some kind of teachers’ meeting delayed the morning bell. Fortunately, Grace had nothing until a conference call at 10, but she ended up rising at the usual hour anyway and using the time to put out breakfast properly for a change—place mats, napkins, two vitamins for Luisa, four for herself.
The Wall Street Journal lay centered on the doormat, as always. Otherwise, the hall was carpeted with copies of the Times. In this building they thought in terms of second acts, not second derivatives. Increasingly, Grace did, too. Response to loss, she supposed, the flash of recognition that brought down the curtain.
She carried the Journal to the table and turned to the market agate, hoping numbers would take her mind. Bond spreads were widening. She heard the bath
room door open. Thirty-year treasuries up, currencies adjusting to one another like riders crowding onto the subway. Once Luisa began to move, it was like compound interest, excruciatingly slow at first but accelerating until she exploded into the kitchen with blemishes all covered, hair just so. Without a word to Grace, she wolfed down her cereal, left the vitamins, and raced for the bus.
Grace went to the sink with the dishes, which Mrs. Cruz would take care of. The place mats and napkins she left in place for dinner, just in case Luisa deigned to appear. After a quick check of her face in the bathroom mirror, Grace picked up the Journal and turned on the light at her desk.
The front page always comforted her—its old-fashioned etched portraits, its snippets on the left, the gray orderliness of it all. As always, she started with “What’s News,” just in case she didn’t have a chance to get through the whole paper. Ordinarily she worked her way from top to bottom, but when she noticed the words “Day and Domes,” she jumped to them. It was the Gnomon deal. She turned to the second section. She hadn’t heard a word at the bank, but since she had asked off the team, she wouldn’t have. Off meant off. That had suited her just fine until now.
She read the article twice. A proxy fight made no sense. They were almost never good for the acquiring company. Before she left Chicago, Tom had already squeezed the numbers until they cried out. He had qualms at a lower price than Gnomon was selling at today. One night, he had talked through some of his thoughts with her, saying, “Where do we go from here?”
At the time, she had not imagined that it could also be a relationship question. She had not thought that where she would go was back to New York alone. She had been stupidly confident that everything would work out if he just opened up, but when he did, he did not even seem to need to draw breath, and she needed to escape.
She had never assumed he had been faithful to her after he had left her in New Haven. Oh, maybe at first, but not once he disappeared and Jim sprang up in his place, though even then she had struggled with guilt about sleeping with Jim in the room where she had slept with Tom. She could not put a date on when she had stopped feeling disloyal. It was not a discrete point in time. It was more like a downward-sweeping curve, growing steeper as it approached the x axis, as if guilt were a wasting asset. And then Jim became one, too.
She folded the Journal and pulled herself upright. No need to blow her nose or fix her eyes. That phase was over. She had to get going. The conference call wasn’t going to be that important, her part in it even less, but she hated when someone dialed in from a cab, always losing the cell signal, beeping on and off the line like a smoke alarm with a low battery.
The doorman blew his whistle, and a taxi pulled right over. She gave the address and opened the paper as they pulled into traffic. She tried to attend to the Fed on the front page but gave up and returned to the second section. After rereading the article, she pulled out her BlackBerry and pinged D&D’s stock price. The market had just opened, and it was down significantly. A few minutes later she pinged again. Down further. They would be trying to talk the price back up, because if they didn’t, it might reach the red zone where somebody might try to put the company in play.
She opened a blank e-mail and typed enough characters to pop Tom’s name into the address field. In a foolish moment she had erased his private address from her contacts, so if she sent him something, it would have to go through Gail. This made her queasy as she began to thumb the keys. First the heading: WSJ Article. Then the message.
—I just saw the WSJ. You OK?
She looked at those words and began deleting from the end. Then she zapped the whole message. He had enough trouble today without her inserting herself into it. She had already intruded once on whatever hard-won sense of order he had managed to achieve. The townhouse without books. The rooms without signs of life. When the taxi pulled up, she was ready with the fare, though she almost left her laptop on the seat.
She reached her desk and dialed the conference number before taking off her coat. Things were still at the beeps and mumble stage. She cradled the phone against her shoulder—always a painful mistake—so that she could snap her laptop into the docking station. She and the call settled down together. As it rambled on, she Googled D&D and read the traffic stacking up behind the leak. She turned in her chair and checked the Bloomberg. Analysts were quoted with nothing good to say. Eventually, the conference call went the way of all conference calls. The client’s guy thanked everyone with formality covering irritation. It ended early, leaving her with ten minutes of found money before the next thing on her calendar. She called her boss.
“I can’t talk about it, as you know,” he said.
“I’m not asking you if the Journal was right,” she said.
“What else is there to ask?”
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t like you.”
“Is everything all right, I guess,” she said. “That’s what I’m asking.”
“I guess the Chinese wall doesn’t keep me from saying it’s a Chinese fire drill,” he said.
She went about her business as well as she could, doing the meetings, doing the e-mail, doing lunch with a representative of a client of the bank. On the walk back she went to her BlackbBerry. Nothing there but junk. D&D finally holding, but in the sub-basement. Something led her to go to her Sent queue to make sure she had succeeded in passing on to a client the information he had asked for. That was when she saw it, the cut-off message to Tom that she thought she had deleted.
—I just
Somehow she had managed to push Send. She stopped dead on the sidewalk. Someone stepped on her heel.
Why couldn’t you call an e-mail back? Why couldn’t questions answered be unasked?
Donna could gauge how upset Brian was by his timbre. Dynamics were not the measure. Pianissimo could be a whisper across the pillow or a warning hiss. When he had called last night to say that he would miss the children’s choir concert, she could barely hear him. She did not dare reveal her disappointment. His voice . . . she had never produced such a pianissimo on her fiddle. It was not a sound she wanted to make or hear.
When he called from the plane the next day on his way home from New York, he was sounding right again. Sometimes his resilience astonished her. If she so much as hit a ringer in rehearsal, she was a wreck for weeks. Over the noise of the plane he asked how the boys had done, and she told him they had blended in nicely. She asked him how his meetings had gone. He simply said, “OK.” She knew he had to be careful because the plane was full of people who tuned to his 440 Hz A. Suddenly the line went flat, the connection broken. She waited, but he did not call again. On her BlackBerry she checked D&D’s stock price, the way Brian had shown her to do. It had gone back up, but just a little. She could only imagine how much she and Brian had lost, let alone the whole company. The voice inside him must have been shrieking, a string bowed behind the bridge.
The volume of messages pouring into Rosten’s queue after the leak was so great that he told Gail to do triage on them. Any that came from addresses in the financial community she was to forward to Harms’s office, where a nonresponse was being prepared. She did see Grace Bondurant’s name and recognized it, but it was from the bank’s address and referred in the subject line to the newspaper article, so she did what she had been told and dispatched it unopened to Investor Relations.
6
You are still wearing the ring.”
“Megan is hurting. She wants everything back the way it was. Last night I smelled alcohol on her breath.”
“This was a shock?”
“She was in her room when I got home. I knocked and asked for a hug. She took a while, but eventually she opened the door, smelling of Listerine and gin.”
“Did you get the hug?”
“I told her I wanted to teach her the right way. We could have a glass of wine at dinner, like they do in France. She started to cry. Tell me how I could have kept all this from happening.”
“I feel like I’m about to fly into pieces.”
“Is that what you need the ring for? To hold yourself together?”
Gunderman had to pull and twist to get it past the callus it had built up. The skin beneath was fishy white.
“Here. Take it.”
“Being a depository for people’s bad memories is not one of the services I provide. Tell me how you feel without it on.”
“I suppose you want me to say free.”
“Just say what comes.”
“Loss then.”
“Part of yourself?”
“Something that’s me and not me.”
“Dispose of the ring whenever you feel it is right. Or put it back on. It may be protecting you from other people.”
“Who?”
“Don’t you want to find out?”
Gunderman looked at his watch.
“Time’s up.”
“Maybe we should think of double sessions for a while.”
“Because I’m in such bad shape.”
“To hasten the progress.”
Gunderman stepped into a hallway that, thankfully, was empty, but when he reached the lobby, everyone seemed to be looking at his left hand. He put it in his pocket, and there was the ring, feeling large. He lifted it on the end of his finger, stirred it around, then took his hand out again. A nicely turned-out woman strode toward him on the sidewalk. He felt blood rising into his face and looked at his feet. Don’t be a fool. The woman didn’t so much as glance—at finger, feet, or face.
Inside the Dome he left his naked hand exposed and imagined the talk on the Admin News Network. Did you see his ring finger? I didn’t take off my wedding band until I left the courtroom. Do you think he’s saying he’s available? Sam Gunderman? You’ve got to be kidding.
“Morning, Mr. Gunderman,” said Maurice at the security desk.
“When did you start calling me mister?”
“Well, I’ve worked here twenty-five years.”
Gunderman stepped into an empty elevator and pulled out the ring. Then the elevator slowed, and he quickly dropped it back into his pocket. The door opened on Sara Simons.
